The Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) router must be configured to authenticate all received MSDP packets.

MSDP peering with customer network routers presents additional risks to the core, whether from a rogue or misconfigured MSDP-enabled router. MSDP password authentication is used to validate each segment sent on the TCP connection between MSDP peers, protecting the MSDP session against the threat of spoofed packets being injected into the TCP connection stream.